Hi William,

which is what COIN is about. Inflicting defeat (annihilation and/or exhaustion) on an armed enemy.
You might make a case for exhaustion if you qualify it as changing the conditions which allow insurgents freedom of movement - in both the physical sense, and in the sense of making their ideas and influence more appealing then the HNs.

I think we have to include the latter to address the conditions that facilitated the rise of the insurgency in the first place. We could be talking about conditions that a third party aggravated, or internal domestic ones stemming from HN Government illegitimacy, or recalcitrance in progressing politically to meet the needs of its citizens.

You could also include the exhaustion of will and means - but those are tricky, and could require something akin to martial law to sustain - a good ole fashioned (non-benevolent) dictatorship that eventually creates greater instability by either ignoring the conditions changing around it, by creating conditions internally that cannot be integrated later down the road, or something that combines them all - at some point that makes for an awfully ugly baby and given our FP (not British) - we'll have to deal with it in some fashion that suits our strategic culture.

Certainly I believe there are some insurgents that just have to be killed, just like I believe that there are some criminals that must be hanged (or however the state administers capital punishment), but the political purposes of insurgency and counter-insurgency are not achieved solely and in a lasting manner by limiting the goals to annihilation to exhaustion - those may be the military goals in the strictest sense, but that does not realize the political objective.

To sound like a stuck record, I believe the US Army's (and UK to a lesser extent) problem with COIN is that it is viewed as something difficult and distinct, instead of the bread and butter of contemporary and historic military forces. The fact that this belief persists strongly indicates a lack of understanding as concerns the nature of the enemy, that means people focus on the nature of the conflict instead.
I'd say we do both because we have to in order to serve the political purpose . For all our similarities with our closest allies, we are still different, and our strategic culture and heritage is different, our responsibilities are different, our political system is different, and our place in world affairs is different. I'm not trying to come off as an arrogant American - but in order to determine the nature of the war you are in, you have to know yourself, know the enemy and know the terrain - in this case the latter includes how the various participants are integrated right now, and at least consider how they are integrated further down the road. It comes back to politics; war, divorced of a political purpose is not a tool to achieve anything.

Best, Rob